cursor genuinely makes me mass produce tickets that used to take hours

fullstack dev, mostly typescript and python. I switched from vscode to cursor about 5 months ago after hearing about it on every dev podcast for what felt like a year straight. I was skeptical because I'd tried copilot and found it hit or miss. cursor is different.

the tab completions are where most of the speed comes from for me. it's not just autocompleting function names. it'll predict entire blocks based on what I'm clearly about to do. I'm writing a zod schema and it fills in the next 3 fields because it can see my database types. I'm writing a test and it predicts the assertion based on the function I'm testing. it's right maybe 70% of the time and when it's wrong I just keep typing. but that 70% adds up to a lot of saved keystrokes over a day.

the chat is useful for stuff I'd normally google. "how do I set up rate limiting in next.js middleware" or "what's the prisma syntax for a compound unique constraint." instead of reading a stack overflow answer from 2022 that might be outdated, I get an answer in context that usually works with my existing code. I still verify things but the loop is faster.

composer is where it gets wild. I can describe a feature in plain english and it'll scaffold the whole thing across multiple files. API route, service layer, types, basic UI component. I don't ship what it generates directly but it gives me a starting point that's way faster than writing boilerplate from scratch.

one thing I've noticed is that the quality of what cursor gives me depends a lot on how well I describe what I want. short vague prompts give me generic code. longer prompts with specific context give me code that's actually close to what I need. I've started dictating my prompts through willow voice when they're complicated because I can explain what I want more naturally when I'm talking. stuff like "ok so I need an API endpoint that takes a user ID, checks if they have an active subscription in stripe, and if they do returns their usage data from the last 30 days aggregated by week. if they don't have a subscription return a 403 with a message pointing them to the pricing page." that kind of detailed prompt gets way better results than me trying to type it concisely.

my workflow now is basically: understand the ticket, dictate a detailed description of what needs to happen, let cursor scaffold it, review everything line by line, adjust, write tests, ship. for straightforward tickets I'm probably 2-3x faster than I was in plain vscode.

other cursor users, what's your workflow look like? and has anyone figured out good practices for composer specifically? I feel like I'm still underusing it.